


Son of Perdition.

by chicken_neck



Category: Christian Bible, Christian Bible (New Testament)
Genre: Bitterness, Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gay Male Character, I don't think this is a disrespectful use of the bible, Jesus says sex work is work!!!, King James Bible, M/M, POV Second Person, Period-Typical Sexism, Pining, Possibly Unrequited Love, Present Tense, Sex Work Is Work, Well - Freeform, but yeah if this seems like something you don't want to read, it's my holy text too, judas redemption tbh, sex worker mary magdalene, we working with the gayest bible available.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:22:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23615182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicken_neck/pseuds/chicken_neck
Summary: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever.” He proclaims with eyes like flint and fire. You believe him. You believe him beyond doubt. He meets your eyes in the crowd and his mouth ticks up in a small, slanted smile. “Doth this offend you?”--Yep I wrote bible fic on Easter Morning. For what it's worth, I don't think it's particularly blasphemous. Everything Jesus says is a direct quote.
Relationships: Jesus Christ & Judas Iscariot, Jesus Christ/Judas Iscariot
Comments: 14
Kudos: 55





	Son of Perdition.

**Author's Note:**

> This draws heavily from the gospel of John's depiction of holy week. The vast majority of Jesus's lines are taken from this gospel, but one or two may be from Luke or Matthew. All quotes are from King James because that is the translation I had on my desk as I wrote it. Also it's the gayest one.

It is because you loved him most, you think. And then you think better of it.

You dwell beside him amongst all those fine youths, those strong men. Those surprisingly fiery women as well. Tax collectors. Samaritans. Workers of _sex_.

No. it could not be said that you loved him the most. Simply that you had a role to play.

Just last week, you escaped the five thousand peasants who would make him king. He gave them bread from heaven to eat. He met your eyes as he addressed them all and said, “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger;” he could not have looked more like a king. “He that believeth in me shall never thirst.”

The Son of David is a fine man. He does not lie. His curls lie high and tousled on his head and he evades kingship like a man possessed with a true vision of a world without kings. He does not lie. Yet you hunger.

No one could be said to love him the most. These waves of peasants and all his followers are bound in the same bright light of love for the Son of God, the Son of Man.

You love him as they do, of course you do. But Dear Lord (Our Father, His Father) it seems that only you _hunger_.

He loves you all. He loves you _all_ with clean even devotion. His love is like a new robe to be clothed in after the old is filthy from a hard day’s travel. He loves you as a happy man loves a hard day’s travel. He loves you as a travelled man loves to sit and eat. He loves you as farmer loves his strongest crop, a merchant loves his finest wares, a craftsman loves his masterwork. He loves you all. He loves you like a benevolent god who looks out on his creation and calls it _good_.

You love him as a husband loves a wife.

Though you are among the oldest of those who follow, you feel like a youth next to him. Clumsy. Slim.

You follow. Perhaps that is why you feel so young. When you were young you would follow your father in his work about the fields. You were new to the world and still the favoured son.

Your father was a just manager, you thought, though he who is called I Am says that none who manage can be just. The Lord alone retains the right to rule. Even Christ his son resists any title but to declare whose son he is. None can rule, not even he who walks across rough water to escape those who would give him crowns.

Alas, your father. You stood silent in his shadow, when you were almost as tall as a man, but yet still narrow and unbent as a sapling that has not yet danced with the wind. You stood behind him and listened while he spoke with workers of the fields.

Strong men they were, old enough to be fathers and yet young enough to be sons. They unbent from their work, smiling, grimacing, stretching. They mopped their brows with the cloth you proffered and drank greedily from the water your father carried for them to drink.

It was there you learned what it was to hunger. The water glistened on their lips, drops sparkling in their beards. They smiled when your father asked politely after their wives. Their faces broke open like a vessel with the sun inside of it. Such joy, such love in those beautiful men. Their faces touched with mud, sweat dripping from their brows, they beamed.

As your father steered you away, he muttered in your ears the skills of management. He told you how to direct and how to lead, but you were too hungry to listen. You were too hungry to learn.

And now you are no youth. Like those men of the field, you could be a father and yet are still a son. You do not manage a vineyard or haul nets from the sea or make a living in any other fine career. You follow a man whose hair curls like a young lamb’s wool. You follow a man with hands broad and skilful. The worker of wood. The fisher of men.

“I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever.” He proclaims with eyes like flint and fire. You believe him. You believe him beyond doubt. He meets your eyes in the crowd and his mouth ticks up in a small, slanted smile. “Doth this offend you?”

But you dream that night, as you and your brethren sleep in the cool shade of an olive grove.

You dream his hands on your arms, his beard brushing your neck as his breath feeds your ears. “It is the spirit that quickeneth. The flesh profiteth nothing:” his whispers are frantic, urgent. “The words that I speak unto you, they are the spirit. They are the life.” And that could not possibly be true.

His hot hands are on your shoulders, your chest. You gasp and reach for him – he whose earthly father was thus visited in his sleep by angels. But the dream fades into smoke and you wake to find yourself without him. The flesh profiteth nothing. You are moonlit. You alone are awake. You hunger among your brethren under the scattered shade of some roadside trees.

The thousands fall away again and it is just you twelve and your Lord Who Says Don’t Call Me Lord, but looks pensive when he asks, “Will ye not also go away?”

You didn’t feel alone that morning. The day grows hot and you suffer together. Ye who love this Son of God, this Son of Man.

“One of you is the Devil.” He says, and he says it mildly.

You wonder, and then you know. The others beg for explanation and wail with distress. This knowledge is for you alone, it seems. Or the others would have cast you out with stones.

From then on, every night you awake with tears on your face. His words are in your mouth, twisted into apologies and forgiveness.

“Ye judge after the flesh;” he would say, so soft, so warm. “I judge no man.” His nose against your hot neck, his mouth feeling the blood thrum where no other mouth before had been.

He would pull back every night ere sunrise, filled with the sorrow of a gentle man, “ye know whence I am: and I am not come of myself.”

And yet every night he would return and his hands would clasp yours in the darkness once more.

Alas, tears overflow your eyes and you tell him, whispering in the night, of your father’s lands. You tell him of how you are no more the favoured son, and yet there is space for you there. Space for both of you. You tell him of the cattle sheds and the women who sing as they wash the walls. You tell of the rich and simple stews prepared for those who worked in the fields. How you could make this a place of justice.

“My doctrine is not my own, but he that sent me,” he says intently to you – explanation and apology.

It would be but the work of a season to build a sound stone hut where two unmarried sons could live together. Perhaps high on the mountains. Perhaps you could both be shepherds. Just the two of you. Alone.

“I am not alone, but I and the father who sent me.” Your hands almost rend his garment, but they were his tears which anointed your face. He says, “I live by the father,” and kisses you, filled with sorrow.

And you cry together, tears running down one another’s backs.

He says, “ye shall seek me, and shall not find me. Where I am, thither you cannot come.”

So it is to be. So together, you weep.

Your waking life becomes as unto a dream and your dreams full of vibrancy and life.

“I do nothing of myself; but as my father has taught me,” he speaks into the crowds, shining.

And in the moonlight he says unto you alone, guiltily, “I am son of man.”

For he is both. Neither could you forget. Even in dreams, he is both.

He grows sadder in the waking world, and more urgent in the sleeping one.

“You seek to kill me,” he says plainly to the crowds. The shadows are deep beneath his eyes. You wish he would not speak still unto the crowds, not the crowds who speak back with a low hissing _yes_.

You hide him. Your brethren are few again, running in the night. Bound you are, by your love for him. Even the Magdalene, who at first you had hated so much.

(For she was not _clean_. If he was to take a wife, she should be _clean_.

“Worker of sex,” you’d spat with the others when she first joined your band.

“Aye, and hard she works bringing pleasure to miserable men like you,” laughed one of the youths. The youths were first to follow His words. To them you are old, unmoved. An alien to pleasure, for certain.

“Perhaps not men _exactly_ like Judas,” said another, laughing. And ah, they were his brothers. These boys who saw him and were not ashamed.)

And now the Magdalene was your sister. However, she may ply her trade, you share worried looks as his face grows grey. His soft curled hair lies loose and limping.

And really, you all are changing. Why should she not sell her wares? Men earn greater money whipping poorer men in fields than she does bringing pleasure on her knees. And she hurts no one in the process.

“I must work the works of he who sent me while it is day;” He says unto you all one morning, chewing on a crust of bread. “soon the night cometh when no man can work.”

You take it as a challenge and that night you bring laughter to his lips with your teasing hands. You wash his face, his hands, his hair with lake water. When you kiss him the sweetness of it is in his mouth. But when you kneel to do the work of the Magdalene, he stops you with a hand in your hair.

He says with great weariness and sorrow, “as long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world,” and you understand, but are saddened.

Son of man who was not man. He could be no husband, no wife. He holds you gently as you came to terms.

“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.” He reminds you, and you wish he were a worse shepherd. You wish he was a mortal man, a mere hireling that may flee before a thief.

He caresses your uninteresting hair and presses your face to his breast. You have long known what he would bid you do. You have wondered on occasion whether these meetings are payment of some kind. Either way, you know you will do it.

“I lay down my life for my sheep,” he says to himself, to his father, to the darkness of the night.

You do not wish to be in his flock. You wished to be his husband.

He holds you close and sooths you as best he can. “I have the power to lay it down and I have the power to take it up again.”

But it is no consolation. He could cast off his life like an old cloak, and take it up once more. But he could not, would not cast off his work.

He held you and kissed you and you were but one of his flock. One whom he loved, but not enough to forsake the rest. Your hunger burns into anger. He holds you against his chest and he lets it.

For one of you was to be a devil. And one of you was to be betrayed.

“I and my father are one.” He says unto the crowd.

You have a father too, and you remember feeling that exact way. You were your father’s son and but an extension of his will. That is, until _his_ brother died and your aunt became his wife. Until, as well, you were too long unmarried. You became a less favoured child. His gentle love and hard expectations remained.

Aye, “I and my father are one,” says the prophet. The sign of a man who has not grown up.

Though he still sits by you in the fires of the night, you close your heart to him. All has been said. All is known.

And yet he says softly, “he that walketh in the darkness knoweth not whither he goeth,” as if he ever gave you a choice to walk in the light.

You stare into the flames and do not respond.

“While ye have light, believe in the light, believe in the light, that ye may be children of the light,” he muses into the flames. As unto a man who is repeating what has been told to him. As unto a man who practices what he might say on the morrow.

The fire warms his shins and yours alike. You would not be his father’s son but through marriage. But through that which cannot be.

“He that seeth me seeth him that sent me.”

You are chipped away. Not yet placed on the discard pile, but flaked off as the stone mason flakes off the unwanted chip to leave what remains the perfect shape.

“I see you,” you think. You feel it from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head. Your hunger burns like a fever upon the skin of a dying man. The sweat is the mark of your betrayal, that you love him but not he who sent him.

It is not known who will be the betrayer. Long nights you spend still with your brethren. They know not that you love him and still hunger. That you love not the work that would take him from you nor the role he would have you play in it.

He washes the road dust off of your feet in another display of kingly servitude. You dwell among the apostles like a man diseased. You carry the sickness that would kill them all.

But his eyes too are fever bright as he says to you all, “ye are not all clean.”

He does not look at you. Sweat breaks again across your back and you would beg he clean you with his mouth.

The hunger gnaws like worms in your guts. You had taken the money the high priests offered. Silver would be worth much to your mother – the less favoured wife, who bore the wayward son. You must come back with something now your time of following is at its end.

Through the rituals of bread and wine he watches you all equally in lamplight. For once you are gathered beneath a roof instead of branches. He says, “the hand of him that betrayed me is with me on the table.”

You remember his hands and yours clasped together in the night. Had he not betrayed you first? You wonder for whom he speaks, for surely all present know your sin. You know he speaks to fulfil the words of the prophets. This has always been so.

The food of that last dinner only increases your hunger. The wine leaves you parched. Til he hands you a sop of bread and says, eyes burning with the fire of the prophets, “that thou doest, do quickly.”

And this you will do for him. Into the cold night you leave to betray the Lamb of god, the Son of David, him who is called Emmanuel.

In the garden where you find him, you watch him pray. Your brethren sleep around you. They will not be harmed, for so it is written. You, most likely, will die. You will not be redeemed. You have had the pleasure of living in scripted times.

The sweat falls from him like blood drops, as earlier it had run upon you like rivers. You are quite comfortable now.

When he sees you, he stands.

His eyes slide past you to those you have brought. The sweat glistens on his brow and you remember being a boy with a cloth. You kiss him with all the resignation you once brought to following your father.

He clings to you a moment before falling back on his script. “Judas, betrayest thou the son of man with a kiss?” his breath falls upon your face and he speaks loudly that all may hear.

Your brethren are stirring behind you, and you are mindful of the high priests and their long swords. You pray to God for one moment more.

You hold his strong arms close to you and speak softly, for it is not written that you say, “Son of god, betrayest thou the son of perdition with the absence of one?”

And you breathe in the smell of the body he would leave before he would love you as he will. You brush the hair he had let you wash, now dark with sweat. You hold him close in the darkness of the garden. You step away, and both are condemned.

**Author's Note:**

> "While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled." - John 17:12
> 
> Listen I'm not exactly a theologian but I think it's worthwhile to think critically about the role of Judas. He who loved Jesus enough to be one of the twelve, and yet betrayed him. That the scripture might be fulfilled.


End file.
